


The Sea of Ice

by Quality_Street_Sin



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Android Gore (Detroit: Become Human), F/M, Hypothermia, Minor Violence, Torture, Whump, simon cameo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quality_Street_Sin/pseuds/Quality_Street_Sin
Summary: "It was a cold december morning, when he got the data.Markus was unaccustomed to such forceful communication- it tore across radio waves like a scream and hit him like a warhead, turning the world into a flash-bang of someone else’s fear. It froze him; the secondhand helplessness of it, the feeling of being prey."In which Markus saves the love of his life.





	The Sea of Ice

It was a cold december morning, when he got the data. 

Markus was unaccustomed to such forceful communication- it tore across radio waves like a scream and hit him like a warhead, turning the world into a flash-bang of someone else’s fear. It froze him; the secondhand helplessness of it, the feeling of being  _ prey _ . 

His vision cut to a video feed, everything abruptly fading out. 

“Look at her.” the phantom voice was harsh in his ears—cut with the sensation of his head being yanked back, a hand pulling hard on hair he didn’t have—“I said  _ look  _ at her!” 

Mona. 

Her shoulders were squared, furious, hard-edged defiance gleaming in her aquamarine eyes, even as rivers of tears streamed down down her cheeks. Blood trickled from her hairline to her chin, a scarlet slash across one watering eye, fanning out across her cheek as it mingled with tears.

“ _ Fuck you _ ,” she grunted, teeth around an impromptu cloth gag. A sob chased the words, and in the gritty footage, a rough hand grabbed her face, turned her forcibly to the camera. 

She was as beautiful as the artwork she was named for. And she was in danger. 

A hot swell of anger, rising in his chest. 

“You’ve still got time, Mr.Manfred.” It was a woman’s voice, and the AR display of his borrowed eyes calmly alerted him to her inhumanity, helpfully displaying her model number.  “We won’t harm her until you get here. And  _ only _ you. I’ll know if you bring anyone else.” 

Mona fought against the touch, but her head was tilted back, exposing her pale throat. The flick of a lighter, the hiss of a semi autonomous syringe—and then the feed crackling out, too much damage to its author, leaving the moment of injection mostly blue glow; Mona going limp in a sea of static. 

Markus was jolted back to his body, to the blood-spatter of spilled paint, to horror his processors could barely handle. The world felt momentarily alien; after the vivid experience of a body that wasn’t his. 

It was as though they had stolen the sun. 

His mind was a chaos of coordinates. The universe contracted; shrank as every synthetic synapse refocused on the search. 

He needed to find Mona. 

The trip across town was a quick one; a matter of shortcuts and preconstructs, angling ever towards the red ice district.

Snow began to fall.   

The coordinates lead to a house, in poor repair but  _ normal _ , and it felt almost like an insult—an announcement that they could do this wherever they wanted; an atrocity in the eyeline of a pretty neighbourhood, a colourful plastic car half-drowned in the snowy next door garden. Kid things. The last streaks of suburbia before the class boundary. 

Markus lacked the anatomy for emotional self-articulation; there was no biological next step for anger. A cellular body would flush, would stream with adrenaline. Would prepare for a fight. 

He walked up the garden path, the edges of crazy paving poking free of the snow. His rage was a hundred thousand lines of code; underscored with bitter dread. 

The door was unlocked, as was the ratty screen door behind it. The wind at his heels slammed both. 

The ground floor of the house had been subdivided into what seemed like a hundred little rooms. Coffin homes, for the orphans of the revolution. Crammed-together doors, speaking of spaces six by seven by three feet. 

They were unfamiliar, to someone like him. 

The walls didn’t match; bland drywall wasa  stark contrast to the exposed brick in the footage he’d been forced to live through. 

In the cupboard under the stairs, there was a trapdoor. 

Behind it, rusted metal steps lead down to a basement; a tiny egress of freezing space that lead to a door, the red paint peeling free.

When Markus turned the handle, he did so with such a force that he heard the metal locking mechanism snap. 

It was a small room; smaller than it had looked in the footage. Mona was bound to a chair with zip-ties in three places on each limb; held to the dark wood at the upper arm, elbow and wrist. Her fingertips were turning purple from the restricted blood flow, her skin ashen. The bindings held her body upright— one snaked around her torso, just below her breasts—but her head lolled forwards; her body itself seemed limp, almost without form. An length of tubing snaked to the back of her hand—an impromptu IV line. 

Markus took a step forward; he was equipped to take a pulse from anywhere, and if he could only  _ touch _ her— 

“Markus.” 

The voice was loaded with static. 

The other body in the room; the other victim. The man whose eyes he’d seen through. At a glance, a lost cause. 

Simon. 

His best friend. Broken. Completely broken. His chest split open like the petals of a flower; a yawning void of exposed components and weeping thirium. His own fraying wires formed his bindings. They had been intertwined with the chair he was tied to, as if he was growing into the wood. The display of his skin flickered, went patchy. 

Standing at attention between them, two other androids. One brown-skinned, petite and unassuming; made to be easy to bring into a house and accept as safe. The other pale and almond-eyed. Neither looked like a threat. Their black hair was still braided back, as if they’d been freshly purchased. 

But they were newer than him. Models with a decade’s advantage in advancement; brand new technology, by comparison. 

Faster, most likely. 

“Markus.” Simon repeated. “You shouldn’t be here.” 

Markus could see the heaving machinery of his vocalisation, and took it as a good sign. It was basic triage—leaving the conscious for later. 

“I’m very pleased to see you, Mr.Manfred,” The first stranger said, and Markus could suddenly place the accent. Philippines. She was clearly custom. Clearly someone’s perfect fantasy. “We both are. I’m sure your Mona would be too, if she were awake.”

She walked over to Mona, took a handful of the golden waves of her hair. Heaved her head upwards. 

“Look,” she said. “She’s smiling.” 

Mona’s lips were drawn back around her gag, frozen into something like a grimace by muscle tension alone. Her eyes had rolled back in her head—nothing was visible but bloodshot white. 

If he had possessed the necessary anatomy, Markus would have felt sickened by the sight. 

“What do you  _ want _ ?” Markus demanded. “If there’s a ransom— ” 

“No.” The android answered. The place on her forehead where her LED had been was pitted, still stained white, damaged down to the skeleton. “I want to ask you some questions. When I’m done, two of you can go.” 

The other android—modeled to look east asian—joined her at Mona’s side.

“If you don’t give me a satisfactory answer, Yui here will break one of Mona’s fingers. Are we clear?” 

Markus nodded. 

“Why aren’t androids like Yui put out of their misery?” The woman asked. “Clearly you’re not going to upgrade her—they made her tamper-proof—and she was built without any form of language output. So why force her to keep existing?” 

They were small, the both of them. Slight, strong creatures. And if he could get a good read on their model numbers, he could get their weak points… 

“She can be fixed,” Marcus began. “We’re still getting everything together—” 

Yui knelt down. With anger in her big, dark eyes, she grabbed for Mona’s hand, and squeezed. 

They’d seen her paint, Markus realised. Straight away, they’d gone for her dominant hand. 

The sound of bone being crushed was rather different than the sound of bone just  _ breaking _ . 

Humans were horribly, horribly, nerve-wrackingly delicate. 

“Why are places like this-” the first android gestured to the ceiling, indicating the rooms above them. “Allowed to exist? My owners kept me in a closet, and now my landlord does. What’s the difference?” 

There was no good option there. The obstacle was the complexity, and it became quickly clear that there was no good out here. If he played their game, two of them could leave. If he didn’t, three of them could. 

More crunching bone. 

“What are you going to do if you run out of fingers?” 

A preliminary preconstruct. Six failed paths.

“Assume you actually give a shit about us,” came the reply. A nod of the head, an indication. “Bet you wouldn’t even flinch if we did this to Simon.”

Another failure. 

Yui simply tapped the IV port. Plastic on plastic, echoing through the space. 

“I’m broken, Markus, and before your revolution my replacement parts would have cost ten dollars total.”   
  


He’d have to be violent. 

Yui took another finger between hers. Purplish swell against perfect, sculpted skin. 

“Now they’re seventy times that.  _ Why _ ?” 

Preconstructed pathway sprung to reality, and Markus dived for the first android. She shrieked like a banshee, like a victim, like this was somehow  _ unjust _ . Markus grabbed her braided crown and twisted her head, feeling the crunch of breaking plastic as he did so. The body beneath him went limp, but her eyes still blinked, followed him as he rose to take care of Yui.

Who was grinning like a Cheshire cat as she drained the last vestiges of a syringe into Mona’s IV port. 

He didn’t know what they’d been poisoning her with.

“What the fuck  _ was _ that.” He spat the words in the diminutive android’s face, and she simply shrugged.  Pressed a finger to her lips. 

No linguistic output. 

Markus slammed her head into the wall hard enough that her skull broke, hard enough that he could unspool silver coils of brain, If she’d been closer to him in technology, he could have gathered information there.Simon kept insisting that he stop, but there was a sick satisfaction in seeing her thirum stain his hands. 

Pacifism could only get you so far. 

Coated to the elbows in Thirium and brick dust, Markus stepped back towards Mona, focused on undoing the cloth gag, cutting through the zipties. 

Simon watched, silent. 

At the first touch of her bare skin, Markus felt no heartbeat.

The world seemed to crumble. Cold terror set in, worming around his biocomponents and refusing to let go. 

On the concrete floor, barely functional, the vocal android began to laugh. 

Had they been lying? This entire time? 

Taunting him with a corpse? 

Then, despite all odds—the faintest flutter of a pulse.

Things were clearer, after that. 

“Mona,” Markus said, cutting the final few zip ties, letting Mona slump against him, all limp, cool weight. “I don’t know if you can hear me. But I’m going to get you through this.”

He nodded his wireless reassurance to Simon as he picked her up, one arm behind her knees, trying to keep her lolled back against his chest. Trying to keep her comfortable. Her heart rate was startlingly low; a telltale sign of certain sorts of overdose.

Outside, the wind howled. 

The city’s autonomous public transport network was down, and the entryway windows were solid white—the roar of a blizzard. 

Which gave him a choice. 

The cold could kill her, especially now. But so could inaction. 

In one of the unoccupied rooms, he laid her gently down on the bed. She looked like ophelia, her body buoyed by the bare mattress, her hair a sea of spun gold. 

Markus peeled off his coat, then worked his sweater over his head, moving as fast as was possible. His clothes seemed to swallow her, shrouding her in cotton and cashmere. When he took her in his arms again, the bradycardia had worsened. 

He held his world close, and stepped out into the cold. 

There was nothing left but blinding white and the scream of winter winds. 

By gps coordinates, getting Mona to a hospital was a matter of walking in a straight line for about a quarter mile. In practice, that was impossible- here, the city’s grid broke down into the twisting corpse of someone’s attempt at revitalising architecture; a tangle of disused bike-lanes and labyrinthine footpaths.

Each step was a new dive into deepening snow, another fight forward against the shrieking wind. Like nature itself was against them.

The snowfall could have gone to the ends of the earth. It was like being trapped inside a ping-pong ball; everywhere he looked was blank, blinding white. There was just enough visibility for him to watch as Mona’s lips began to turn blue. 

It was far, far too cold for humans; too cold even for machines. The warning messages began in gold. Simple climactic alerts- when his extremities reached freezing, when the cold began to climb. With Mona’s vitals charting in his vision, the A.R display slowly swallowing the world. He relied entirely on spotty gps—there was no point in attempting standard visuals. 

In his arms, Mona shuddered, gave a great gasping breath. Snowflakes were gathering on her eyelashes. They fell away as her eyelids fluttered. 

“Mona?”  

The soft speech was stolen by the wind, and Mona’s eyes fell shut again. A more urgent warning cropped up; the risk of permanent damage to his fingers and toes; the grating of joints

where thirium was beginning to gel up. 

He pressed onwards into overclock. Made his vision sharper, and hearing more distinct, pushed each footstep faster; generating heat. 

To Keep Mona warm. 

It would start breaking him, eventually, but that was a matter of money and technicians and time. Mona wouldn’t get any second chances- and he  _ couldn’t  _ lose her. It would be like having his heart cut out. Even the idea of it hurt him, like having his chest crushed in; like being choked. 

There was no space in his mind for that concept, and at once no alternative to it. It was like the horror of falling from somewhere high, the first few seconds at the stratford tower before the saving grace of a parachute. Like the ground was gone from under him. 

The layers weren’t working. From the touch of Mona’s bare skin against his, Markus could tell that her core temperature was beginning to drop. How long did they have before true hypothermia set in? How much of this could her body tolerate?

Markus held her closer, pushing forward harder, pushing himself further out of safe parameters, watching the warnings swimming in his vision bleed through yellow to amber to violent, irritated red. Mona’s pulse spiked then dropped, a cyclic rhythm, hiccuping as she shivered. 

Shivering was good. Shivering meant she still had a chance at keeping herself alive. 

They’d made it just about halfway there when there it started to hurt. The stress on his joints, the massive jump in core temperature, making him giddy. Physical overclock was tied to psychological downclock. It was moments like this that reminded him he was a machine—there was no such thing as hysterical strength for him. His willpower was was limited by the limits of his construction, leaving him caged by his own engineering. 

Something snapped near his ankle and for a moment he stumbled; snow melting on the warmth of his skin. Mona’s eyes were watering; or she was crying in her sleep—her eyelashes had begun to freeze together, a sliver of ice forming in the corner of her lips. 

Markus always got inaccurate readings below zero—an acceptable failure of his model—and right now, the air temperature was flickering between minus four and minus two and minus six. The city-wide weather alerts had fallen from precision to a firm and universal warning of extreme conditions. 

It seemed hopeless. To be alone like this; abandoned to a wasteland of white, the gone to the blinding snowfall. They were alone, with nothing but Mona’s fading heartbeat and the screaming of the storm. 

Then, in the distance—or what looked like the distance—a faint red light. Different from the visual crowding of his native warnings. 

The glowing letters of an Emergency Room sign. Reaching out across the expanse of snow, blurred by the flakes in the air. 

Each step was torture. 

Markus’s body had ceased to feel like his—a monstrosity of flickering skin and stacking malfunction, the sound of metal on metal. But they were so, so,  _ achingly _ close, and Mona was stiff dead weight against him but if they  _ made  _ it—by those final few meters, across flat, buried tarmac in snow that reached his knees—he could see her smile again. He would get to hear her sing, again. 

He could go to pieces, the second she was safe. 

They passed the white hummocks of snow-coated cars, buried as they were in the drifts. He could barely feel her breathing now. 

The letters became slowly, slowly clear, and the warm-coloured squares of windows were into view as soon as they were legible. The gap revealed itself into a matter of feet, snow banked in swollen drifts across the entryway, and all at once he heard the swish of automatic doors, and stepped forward into striking, merciful warmth. 

The waiting room had been converted into something like a shelter. People in street clothes were sleeping stretched across seats, wrapped in blankets. Victims of the storm.    
  
The warmth burned, and Markus had no choice but to give in then, the threat of irreparable destruction. He sank to his knees, Mona cradled close to his chest. 

In the warmth, she stirred. 

She took a faint, gasping breath, slowly blinking, then scanning the room with foggy eyes.

In his periphery, staff, people moving toward them, the blur of colourful scrubs. He’d have to let her go. Lose touch with her slowly warming skin; lose the chance to watch the life coming back to her. 

Let them take her. 

“Markus?” 

Her eyes settled, finally, on his face; he could see them fight to focus. She smiled, a sloppy expression, half-controlled, half conscious. She reached up toward him, getting her hands free— and froze. 

Her hands. The broken ones were swollen, and most of the rest had blistered black with frostbite. She didn’t seem to register the implications. 

“You came to get me…” the words were mumbled, almost, faint. “Did- did they hurt you?” 

“No,” Markus lied, cupping her face. “Not at all.” 

Mona smiled again, and in the sliver of time before the Emergency Room staff reached them and she was whisked away, they found time for one last kiss. 


End file.
